Archiving Popular Culture Symposium Sunday, 18 March 2018

Archiving Popular Culture Symposium

Sunday, 18 March 2018

12:00 – 12:30pm Registration 12:30 – 1:00pm Welcome Address Christopher Shaw (LASALLE College of the Arts)

1:00 – 3:10pm Panel 1: Popular Culture and the Archives -- Theories, Philosophies, Practices Chair: Christopher Shaw (LASALLE College of the Arts)

The term ‘archive’ is perhaps oxymoronic when situated alongside popular culture – a catch-all phrase to describe culture products of a current era. Covering a multitude of visual media including photography, theatre and animation, this panel will open a discourse on approaching popular culture beyond national branding. It will further focus on a collective memory by looking at its connectivity, community and sharing processes within a regional, national and transnational context. Speakers in the panel consist of both academics and practitioners. The topics relate to the concepts and philosophies behind archiving practices as well as the technologies involved.

Region and Image: What Can We Do with a Digital Archive? Harada Kenichi (Niigata University)

Film Archiving: Philosophy to Practice Chew Tee Pao (Asian Film Archive)

Archiving a Theatrical Company: An Interdisciplinary Attempt at the Centennial of Shinkokugeki Hatori Takafusa (Niigata University)

The Crux of Archiving the Materials of Anime Ishida Minori and Kim Joon Yang (Niigata University)

Curating and Exhibiting the Invisibility of Animation Gan Sheuo Hui (LASALLE College of the Arts)

Discussant: TBC 3:10 – 3:30pm Tea Break

3:30 – 4:30pm Panel 2: Creating Archives for Women and Manga Chair: TBC

Women’s MANGA Research Project has explored manga as a new genre for female participators who were rarely seen in the field of comics before the 21st century, although comics is one of the universal popular cultural forms and Japan has the most advanced and longest history in the production of manga and anime. In our research and meetings with artists of our previous conferences and experiences in South East Asian countries such as Vietnam, Philippines, Australia and Japan, we recognized a need for consideration of how to maintain such a new tendency as history. Most comics have experienced a long male-centered history but our explorations for new participants has just begun. This panel will consider the possibilities for creating manga archives, especially for new works being produced outside the mainstream.

Panelists: Ogi Fusami (Chikushi Jogakuen University) Nagaike Kazumi (Oita University)

Discussant: Deborah Shamoon (NUS)

4:30 – 5:20pm Panel 3: Archiving Asia -- Challenges and Issues on Archiving Popular Culture and Art Forms in Asia

Harada Kenichi (Niigata University) Hatori Takafusa (Niigata University) Ishida Minori (Niigata University) Kim Joon Yang (Niigata University) Ogi Fusami (Chikushi Jogakuen University) Nagaike Kazumi (Oita University) Gan Sheuo Hui (LASALLE College of the Arts) Chew Tee Pao (Asian Film Archive)

5.20 – 5.30pm Closing Remarks Christopher Shaw (LASALLE College of the Arts) Gan Sheuo Hui (LASALLE College of the Arts)

5.30pm End of Symposium

2 Organising Team

Gan Sheuo Hui is a lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts. She received her PhD in Human and Environmental Studies from Kyoto University in 2008. Her research focuses on the interrelations between manga, anime and live- action ﬁlms and the Japanese-inspired forms of artistic content created and performed in Southeast Asia. She approaches these areas with interests that range from practical aspects of production and distribution to theory. Her investigations have often involved meeting creators, curators, and fans as a way of uniting abstract speculations with field work. She has been a guest researcher in the Manga Department at Kyoto Seika University and awarded a fellowship from the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures and spent some time in the UK. Her current projects include a book of essays on contemporary Japanese animation. She is also working on interview surveys of the production and distribution of comics and the related contents industry in Malaysia. This study focuses on the function of publishers of comics as they diversify from comics to games and anime production while reacting to the global changes in the digital media environment.

Fanny Bratahalim graduated from LASALLE College of the Arts in 2014 with First Class Honours in 2D Animation Art. While studying at LASALLE she produced several award-winning animated short films including winning silver at the Crowbar Award 2013 for BUY ME, and Bullets – a music video for Singapore Idol 2006 first runner-up, Jonathan Leong, which was screened at several international festivals including the Golden Orchid International Animation Festival 2014, USA and KINOFEST International Digital Film Festival 2014, Romania. Her final year thesis was adapted, accepted, and presented at the International Digital Storytelling Conference, Athens, Greece 2014. Her passion is in character animation and storytelling and comics. Her main inspiration is Hayao Miyazaki from Studio Ghibli.

Chrystal Ng is currently an Adjunct Lecturer for the Puttnam School of Film and Animation at the LASALLE College of the Arts, as well as at WKWSCI at NTU. She holds a M.Comms from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communications and Information at NTU in 2017, majoring in Film Festival Studies. Her dissertation focused on the history of SGIFF and Singapore’s cultural policies from 1987 to 2000. From 2014 to 2017, she managed the SGIFF Youth Jury and Critics Programme and sees the need for more opportunities for youths to be engaged in the arts. Currently, she is working on projects relating to Southeast Asian film festivals, collective memories and cultural policy from the Cold War perspective. She hopes to pursue her PhD in the field of Film Festival Studies in the near future.

3 Speakers

Chew Tee Pao oversees the development of the film collection at the Asian Film Archive. As Archivist, he works with the Executive Director in strategising the Archive’s key preservation and outreach programmes, while promoting AFA's advocacy and preservation efforts. Tee Pao has written articles on film preservation and contributed a chapter on "Independent digital filmmaking and its impact on film archiving in Singapore" for the book Singapore Cinema: New Perspectives.

Harada Kenichi is Professor of Niigata University and Director of Niigata Regional Image Archive Research Center. After working as a freelance creator/producer and, from 1992, as a member of the research project on Minakata Kumagusu's collection, he received his PhD in sociology from Toyo University in 2005 and published The Development of Image Sociology: The Second Edition, the updated version of his doctoral dissertation, in 2012. He is the co-author of Okada Sozo and the Century of Image: Graphism, Propaganda, and Science Films, which focused on the personal history of one film producer, and the co-editor of Nostalgia Comes with Future: Theories and Realities of the Regional Image Archive, which analyzed how photographic/filmic images has functioned in the regional communities. His newest work is Hand, Feet, Eyes, and Ears: Practices and Studies on Region/Image Archive, an anthology on the multifaceted relationship among the society, the academism, and the digital archives.

Hatori Takafusa is Assistant Professor at Niigata University and Visiting Associate Professor at International Research Center for Japanese Studies. He received his PhD in Human and Environmental Studies from Kyoto University in 2013 and published The Popular Imagination of Japanese Cinema, the updated version of his doctoral dissertation, in 2016. He worked as a research associate at The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum of Waseda University from 2012 to 2015 and curated special exhibitions The World of Ikebe Ryo and The World of Shinkokugeki and Sword-fighting Drama. He is one of the members of Niigata Regional Image Archive Project since 2016.

Ishida Minori got her Ph. D. in Human Environmental Studies in Kyoto University in 2006. Since 2007 she is an Associate Professor at Faculty of Humanities in Niigata University. Since 2017, she has been the vice representative of the Archive Centre for Anime Studies in Niigata University. She publishes many books and articles on contemporary visual-audio culture in Japanese and English.

4 Joon Yang Kim is Associate Professor at Niigata University in Japan. He is the author of Empire of Images: Animation on the Japanese Islands (2006 published in Korean), and many essays on animation and media in Korean, Japanese and English. KIM was involved as curator in Cinema Digital Seoul and many other film festivals for years, and awarded the Japan Foundation Fellowship (long term) for his research project on Astro Boy in 2012. He is Associate Editor of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Sage Publications) and Vice-president of the Japan Society for Animation Studies.

Nagaike Kazumi is a Professor at the Center for International Education and Research at Oita University, Japan. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia (Canada) in 2005. Her research interests include studies in comparative literature, gender/sexuality, and popular culture. She is the author of Fantasies of Cross-dressing: Japanese Women Write Male- Male Erotica (Brill, 2012) and co-editor of the collections Boys’ Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan (University Press of Mississippi, 2015).

Ogi Fusami is a Professor in the Department of English, Chikushi Jogakuen University, Japan. She is a leader of the “Women’s MANGA Research Project” since 2009 (the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) No. 24320047 “Research in Women's MANGA: Glocalization and the Possibilities for Expression of Subjectivity Subjectivity”). She has organized international conferences and exhibits for the Women’s MANGA Research Project since 2009 (Kyoto 2009, Singapore 2011, Hanoi 2012, Sydney 2013, Hong Kong 2014, Manila 2015). This project can be found on www.chikushi- u.ac.jp/womenandmanga. She also serves as an international editor of the International Journal of Comic Art, a member of the Q-Collection Comic Book Advisory Committee, and a member of the 7th board of the Japan Society for Studies in Cartoons and Comics. The most recent collection Ogi edited is Women’s Manga Studies (Seikyusha 2015).

5 Abstracts

Region and Image: What Can We Do with a Digital Archive? Harada Kenichi (Niigata University)

Niigata Regional Image Archive is a research/educational project which aims at (1) collecting and archiving such audio/visual materials as photographs, films, radio programs, and picture postcards produced and/or consumed in/around Niigata from the 19th century; and (2) constituting a collaborative network among MALUI – museums, archives, libraries, universities, and industries – in order to facilitate the reciprocal use of the materials in digital formats. In 2017, Niigata Regional Image Archive Database and Niigata Regional Newspaper Database of Niigata Prefectural Library was integrated into Niigata MALUI Regional Database. The institutional division of Humanities into disciplines, fields, and specializations has reflected the difference of the research subject's medium. However, the development of MALUI network construction and the integration of digital data accumulated by heterogeneous organizations will enable the interconnected coexistence of the visual, the audio, and the written on one platform. This paper will probe into the interdisciplinary possibilities in the digital database integration.

Film Archiving: Philosophy to Practice Chew Tee Pao (Asian Film Archive)

Moving images (both analogue and digital) have in recent times become more utilised and incorporated into various art forms. Preservation has traditionally taken a back seat as compared to production. However, with the proliferation of material being generated, film preservation has risen to the forefront as an urgent and important aspect of work for both archivists and creators. The Asian Film Archive (AFA) will share the archiving principles that have guided its adoption of key operational decisions in relation to preserving film and its related materials. There are general principles for formulating policies regarding acquisition, selection, documentation, cataloguing, and access. The presentation will discuss the preservation challenges faced in this digital era, touching on some of the technical, philosophical, and ethical concerns encountered. Practical case studies will be used to illustrate the process taken from theory to operations.

6 Archiving a Theatrical Company: An Interdisciplinary Attempt at the Centennial of Shinkokugeki Hatori Takafusa (Niigata University)

Shinkokugeki, which literally means "new national theatre", was a theatrical company founded by actor/producer Sawada Shojiro in 1917. Sawada not only created a new realistic style of sword fighting in such plays as Tsukigata Hanpeita and Kunisada Chuji but also challenged a variety of genres ranging from Western dramas composed by William Shakespeare or Georg Kaiser to Japanese Kabuki and Shinpa, and the company established national popularity in the 1920s. After Sawada's untimely death in 1929, pupils Shimada Shogo and Tatsumi Ryutaro succeeded the leading roles and the company had occupied a characteristic position in Japanese entertainment culture until the disbandment in 1987. Through the 30 years from the disbandment, however, the living memory of the company, which ranges from the original acting techniques of the sword fighting to the company/city logistics relationship, has almost disappeared. This paper attempts to reflect on how to archive Shinkokugeki with an interdisciplinary approach.

The Crux of Archiving the Materials of Anime Ishida Minori and Kim Joon Yang (Niigata University)

Anime has been a central part of the Japanese popular culture for many decades, and yet now, the ‘intermediate materials’ of traditional animation production such as model sheets and cels are facing obsolescence. Some of those are published and distributed as books, but an enormous bulk of intermediate materials remains inaccessible for researchers. The centre takes a media ecological approach to anime as a platform organizing images into multi-layered fluid structures. The intermediate materials are expected to provide a valuable basis for empirical research of the processes and aesthetic dynamics of anime production. Archiving—acquiring, cataloguing, and preserving—these materials, the centre aims to serve as an international research hub making them available to researchers both in Japan and abroad. Furthermore, it also seeks to use the collected materials for nurturing future specialists equipped with media literacy by incorporating them into the academic programs of Niigata University.

Curating and Exhibiting the Invisibility of Animation Gan Sheuo Hui (LASALLE College of the Arts)

To quote Norman McLaren from NFB, “Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn”. These famous lines aptly highlight the materiality of animation as well as remind us about the largely concealed creation and collaboration processes. Based on the show “A World is Born: Arts and Designs of 1980s Japanese Animation”, this paper highlights the intermediary animation production materials such as image boards, sketches, multiple pieces of studies of character, background and notes as an approach for analyzing and understanding a work as opposed to just confront them as a finished text or final product.

How to Leave Behind Our Names: Creating Archives for Women and Manga Ogi Fusami (Chikushi Jogakuen University) Nagaike Kazumi (Oita University)

Women’s MANGA Research Project has explored manga as a new genre for female participators who were rarely seen in the field of comics before the 21st century, although comics is one of the universal popular cultural forms and Japan has the most advanced and longest history in the production of manga and anime. In our research and meetings with artists of our previous conferences and experiences in South East Asian countries such as Vietnam, Philippines, Australia and Japan, we recognized a need for consideration of how to maintain such a new tendency as history. Most comics have experienced a long male- centered history but our explorations for new participants has just begun. Our panel will consider the possibilities for creating manga archives, especially for new works being produced outside the mainstream.